XView question

[Barry Margolin]

I'm a little confused about precisely what XView is and isn't, and I'd
like to get cleared up before I pass on misinformation to my users here.

When I first heard about XView (last year, or early this year, I guess), I
got the impression that it could be used as a replacement for the SunView
library.  A SunView application could simply be relinked with XView and it
would invoke X primitives instead of diddling the frame buffer directly.
Conceivably, dynamic linking would allow even the relink step to be
bypassed.  The most important point of this is that no source would be
necessary to covert an application from SunView to XView.

However, a recent posting in comp.windows.x said that XView "makes it easy
to port" applications from SunView to X.  He said it took him a day to
convert an application.  Mention was made of a conversion program, which I
assumed operates on the source.  I admit that this is also a useful
facility, but it doesn't seem nearly as valuable as the above.

Which is correct?

Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.
barmar at think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar